Captured Mumbai terrorist to undergo narco test

Mumbai, Dec 12 (IANS) Ajmal Amir Kasab, the only terrorist in the Nov 26 Mumbai terror strike to be captured alive, will be subjected to a narco analysis test to corroborate all that he has confessed so far and to get more information about the conspiracy, police sources Friday said. Though Ajmal has already given the police a detailed account of the Mumbai terror attack plan, the training he received in Lashkar-e-Taiba’s (LeT) Pakistan-based camps and his personal background, Mumbai crime branch sleuths feel “a narco test might help sift fact from fiction as Kasab is likely to have lied at certain points or hidden some information”, the sources said.

Meanwhile, it has emerged from the investigation that the hand-grenades used in the 26/11 attack were of the same make as the ones used in the 1993 Mumbai blasts. The grenades bear the mark of an Austrian company ‘Arges’ which has a franchise in Pakistan.

Investigators, analysing the information gathered so far, hope to get their next big breakthrough Saturday onwards when they start interrogating two suspects — Fahim Ansari and Mohammed Sabauddin, currently in the custody of Uttar Pradesh police.

The two suspects, who are respectively in the Lucknow and Rampur jails in Uttar Pradesh, are being brought to Mumbai and will be produced before a local court here Saturday.

A crime branch team that went to UP earlier this week to take custody of the two, was requested by the UP police to wait for Fahim’s scheduled production in a Rampur court Friday.

According to information that police has pieced together, Fahim had come to Mumbai in December last year to gather information about the Taj and Oberoi-Trident hotels in the form of maps, photographs and videos. He had also gone around the Gateway of India and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, sources revealed.

In February this year, Fahim was arrested by Uttar Pradesh police while he was on his way to LeT’s Nepal base. He had apparently been called back as arms and ammunition required for the Mumbai strike could not be organised till then, investigators have found.

Sabauddin, arrested around the same time in Lucknow, is suspected to be Fahim’s accomplice in the planning and preparation of the Mumbai terror strike though they did not visit Mumbai together.

Mumbai police are simultaneously questioning one Mansoor Ahmed, suspected to be an associate of gangster Dawood Ibrahim, for his possible role in extending help to the 26/11 terrorists.

Mansoor was earlier arrested under the provisions of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act in connection with the 1993 bomb blasts. He was released in 2006 for want of evidence.